Fitzgerald's TN

[Mark Sacha]

Trying to get a grip on intention in Blood Meridian is very hard. My first
vague thought is the timelessness of violence, referring back to the
epigraph about a 300,000 year old human skull that had been scalped. The
judge will never die. It's an integral part of nature - of some natures.
More that the possibilities of character are sort of inscribed.

McCarthy has this conviction about inherent disposition that he goes over
and over in his fiction and in the rare interviews that he's given. In the
Wall Street Journal interview around the time The Road was published he
mentioned that he thinks that to the extent people are shaped they also are
born with something that can't be molded. Something roughly equivalent to a
soul, although it's more of an alignment, a way that they're encoded to
react to the world. Maybe that's why he makes such use of boy protagonists.
The child of Blood Meridian "can neither read nor write and in him broods
already a taste for mindless violence". On the other hand you have the
child of The Road, who is born into a world of incomprehensible, normative
violence, and yet his good nature is virtually unchanged by it.

Then there's the issue that in light of its context so much of Blood
Meridian is beautiful. You get the sense that it shouldn't be.

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> A young writer- friend of mine recently read Blood Meridian and siad it
> was the first novel that made him feel life might not be worth living. (
> please, all, I am not offering this as any proper response but one from a
> congenital Romantic who felt, overFelt the novel narcissistically. )
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Oct 4, 2012, at 11:25 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actually, this reminds me of Blood Meridian, also. Sentences packed with
> meaning and nuance. At first, the violence is almost overwhelming, but it
> just keeps coming until...I don't know how to describe it, but there is an
> effect that comes from the repetition and the POV of the narrator. He is
> totally neutral.
>
> I don't know McCarthy's intention, but it seems to have something to do
> with pointing out that we all have this whole spectrum of possibilities
> within us. Made me even more concerned for my kids out in the world. Thanks
> a lot....
>
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The letter from Max Perkins is very revealing. Thank you. It brought to
>> mind Alice's suggestion of a way to judge the quality of writing. "The
>> amount of meaning you get into a sentence...."
>>
>> I haven't read Gatsby for many years, and will have to add that to the
>> list.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm feeling tender toward a reading myself. Thanks, motivators, you know
>>> who you are.
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> On Oct 4, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> That settles it. When I finish Blood Meridian, and complete the course
>>> of anti-depressants, TN is next.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 7:07 AM, alice wellintown <
>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> so, though I've read Fitz more times than I care to admit, and Gatsby
>>>> more times than almost any other book,  I was prompted to open TN and
>>>> take a close reading look into how it is constructed. More on this
>>>> later...but the names, a Mr Flesh, a couple of Neverquivers, Diver,
>>>> and names that read like advetisments, an characters who comment on
>>>> the jingles of names. So, nothing wrong with stupid names. Shakespeare
>>>> was not afraid of them. Pynchon only pushes them to new lows, as in
>>>> low puns, a comic tradition.
>>>>
>>>> The faces; the sculpted bodies and faces are also there, not as in
>>>> Hemingway or Faulkner.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> www.innergroovemusic.com
>
>
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